For Authors
Scientific Sports is open to submissions at any time. There are no submission fees and no article processing charges. If your work bears on a scientific sport, we want to read it.
What we publish
- Article — original research, peer reviewed. No length limit, though most run 2,000–6,000 words.
- Review — a survey of existing work on a topic, peer reviewed.
- Technical Note — a short, focused report: a measurement, an apparatus, a method. Peer reviewed. Typically under 2,000 words.
- Meeting Report — an account of a tournament, workshop or conference. Editor reviewed.
- Letter — a comment on work published in this journal. Editor reviewed; the authors of the original work are given the opportunity to reply.
How to submit
Send your manuscript by e-mail to
ss@iktta.org with the subject line
Submission: [your title]. Include in the body of the message the title, all
authors with affiliations, the corresponding author's e-mail address, and the article type you
are submitting under.
We acknowledge every submission within seven days. If you have not heard from us in that time, the message did not arrive — please send it again.
Manuscript format
- Plain text, Markdown or HTML. We do not accept word processor files.
- Mathematics in MathML, or in LaTeX notation that we will convert.
- Figures as SVG where possible; PNG is also accepted. Send figures as separate files, not embedded in the text, and refer to them in the manuscript as Figure 1, Figure 2 and so on.
- References in APA style, with a DOI or URL wherever one exists.
- An abstract of 100–250 words, and up to six keywords.
Review process
The editor first checks that the submission is in scope and formally complete. Articles, reviews and technical notes then go to at least one external referee under a single-anonymised model. We aim to return a first decision within eight weeks. Decisions are accept, minor revision, major revision, or reject, and every decision is accompanied by the referee comments in full.
Rights
On acceptance, copyright in the article is assigned in full to the International Kimwipe Table Tennis Association. The assignment expressly includes the rights of translation and adaptation under Article 27 and the rights of an original author in derivative works under Article 28 of the Copyright Act of Japan. Those two are named explicitly because Article 61(2) of the same Act presumes them to remain with the author unless a transfer says otherwise.
Moral rights cannot be transferred under Article 59 of the Act, so authors additionally undertake not to assert them against the Association or against anyone the Association authorises. This is what makes the assignment workable in practice: without it, an edited title or a translated heading could still be objected to years later.
The purpose of all this is practical. It lets the Association republish, translate, excerpt and adapt the work — in a later issue, an anthology, a translation or any format that does not yet exist — without having to return to the author for permission each time. Authors are of course always credited.
Preprints and prior publication
Posting a preprint does not preclude submission. We do not consider work that has already been published in a peer-reviewed venue, but an expanded version of a conference abstract or meeting report is welcome — tell us about the earlier version when you submit.
Correspondence
Questions about scope, format or anything else: ss@iktta.org